YouTube for Patient and Professional Education

You want to show a patient a video of an endoscopy in your clinic exam room to help them understand the procedure . A few taps on your YouTube app on your smartphone and a search for “endoscopy “ yield several patient education videos about the procedure including Upper Endoscopy by ASGEGIEndoscopy,

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. Because of advanced internet and cell phone bandwidth, video over the internet is now feasible, accessible, and a wonderful way to provide patient and professional education. Instead of transferring large 1 MB per minute files, streaming video servers download part of the video you see and them removes it from your device.

You Tube, at www.YouTube.com , the Google owned internet social networking site where anyone can upload a streaming video for the world to watch has valuable patient and professional medical education gems hidden among mountains of free video files. YouTube has hundreds of millions of users worldwide uploading 24 hours of video every minute. There are 2 billion video views per week on multiplatform computers and smartphones. The good news is that anyone can upload up to 15 minute videos on any subject (not pornographic, violence, child exploitation, hate speak…) The bad news is there is a lot video files to sort through to find something helpful. It is like any internet search, you will have thousands of responses, but many of the videos may not be credible or relevant.

Enter a search term in the YouTube search box for any disease or procedure topic. You will need to pre screen the results before offering a You Tube prescription to your patient. The are credible videos among the forest of video posts but you must filter the good from the bad. You should look at the video author and review the video for content accuracy. Once you have a list of favorite patient education videos, you can share a document file by email, or handout with the exact web links and even post them on your own web site if the video author allows it.

You can increase your odds of finding credible medical videos by doing a search for the word “medical” resulting in 818,000 video files, then on the results page click on the “Search Options” link to filter your results into Channels. There are 4,690 Channels. You will see a list of credible providers that have established medical channels. You can subscribe to individual channels for updates on new videos. Among the hundreds of channels for medical marijuana there are excellent video producers like:

Nucleus Medical Media – 123 videos

British Medical Journal – 31 videos

MUSC Health – 364 Videos

Detroit Medical Center - 110 videos

University of Maryland Medical Center -490 videos

Amerra – Advanced Medical Visualization – 49 videos

AMA American Medical Association – 102 videos

Vanderbilt Health News – 73 videos

Ohio State Medical Center – 249 videos

University of Chicago Medical Center – 129 videos

Medical Student TV - 204 videos

University of Rochester Medical center – 143 videos

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center – 141 videos

Children's Hospital & Medical Center – 153 videos

Rush Medical Center – 140 videos

Mayo Clinic Channel- 1,047 videos

Tulane Medical Center – 95 videos

St Jude Medical Center – 47 videos

OSF St Joseph Medical Center – 70 videos

New England Journal of Medicine – 45 videos

Emory Health Source -378 videos

MD Anderson Cancer Center- 241 Videos

Cleveland Clinic - 467 Videos |

NIH Vodcast - 153 videos

Henry Ford Medical Center – 136 videos

Can’t find what you need , then make your own video. The instructions are clear and simple on the YouTube website. You will need a video camera, a method to download the video file to your PC. You will need video editing software like the free Windows Movie Maker for PCs or iMovie for MAC to cut your video into 15 minutes maximum, then save the file in one of the required You Tube formats like QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files— these are the most common formats and they work well. MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640x480 is what is recommended.. Upload your video to the You Tube server and distribute the link on your website, Facebook page or handouts.

The University of Maryland has a great web index for patient education videos

The list of heath topics are on the left side and video topics in each category are presented for selection. Videos include interviews with UMMC experts, patient success stories, surgical Webcasts, overviews of our programs and services and much more.